My Mayor is kicking ass

I hate Hamnet

Well it was kind of inevitable - I hate most plays, and although Hamnet is a movie, it purports to be about Shakespeare and his biggest banger of a play, Hamlet.

Now I love Hamlet, especially Derek Jacobi's Hamlet - but I like any version that plays up the humor in the "me thinks I see my father, Horatio" scene. After Hamlet says that line, Horatio says: "Where, my lord?" and looks around frantically because it so happens he just came directly from seeing the ghost of Hamlet's father, and then Jacobi, as Hamlet with just the tiniest bit of impatience in his voice responds: "in my minds eye."

You can watch the whole thing for free here! But with commercials, alas.

But HamNET - oh dear god so freaking PORTENTOUS!

If there's one thing I hate about a play or movie, it's portentousness.

The "I see my father" bit comes at minute 20, not counting the accursed commercials. Here's what Jacobi looks like as he's saying "In my mind's eye."

Even in the middle of a capital-T tragedy, Shakespeare gets some humor in. Shakespeare was not portentous, which is why he is great, and Hamnet is not.

To my great relief I see I'm not the only one who feels that way. There are some great reviews out there, including ones that use the word "portentous." Let's enjoy.

Peter Keogh in Artsfuse:

Zhao conveys this exposition through tasteful images, an evocative if occasionally overdone score, and just a hint of the heavy emoting to come. In the first of the requisite agonized birth scenes, the director shows some restraint, as Agnes flees the oppressiveness of Will’s parental home to a favorite spot in the woods, a great tree with a dark opening where, as her crimson gown contrasts with the mossy green of the surroundings, she huddles to give birth. This image — the opening in a tree leading into blackness  — will recur throughout the film, matched later by a doorway in the fake forest scenery at Will’s London theater that passes through illusion into the void.

That subtlety gives way to hamminess, mawkishness, and absurdity, a shameless effort to exploit the universal experiences of frustration, rage at iniquity, and grief. Mescal starts it off, chewing the scenery as a drunken Will agonizes in a candle-lit attic attempting to write his masterpieces. Agnes sees his need to escape the tyranny of his father, the strictures of a growing family, and the oppressiveness of a future as a glovemaker. She orders him to go off to seek his fortune in London.

Then it’s Buckley’s turn. Once again she gives birth, indulging in its agonies but with enough strength left over to endure a flashback to the death scene of her own mother. This time she gives birth to twins, but one, the girl, is stillborn! Everyone weeps! But no, Agnes coaxes her back to life! Tears of relief! But later, the plague strikes the 11-year-old bonded pair, first Judith, then Hamnet, who offers his life in return for hers to the specter of Death. He kicks the bucket entwined with his surviving sister — just before the errant father can rush home from touring with his company — giving Mescal the opportunity to indulge in the grief orgy with an added twist of guilt.

These performances bring to mind Hamlet’s thespian advice to the players:

O, it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who for the most part are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb shows and noise. 

 

I suspect Hamlet would not have approved of the acting in Hamnet.

Amen.

Oh Jesus, there is so much screaming in this movie. I like the review by Adam Nayman in "The New Republic" because it gives a shout-out to the far superior movie "Shakespeare in Love" even if Nayman and Harold Bloom (ugh) are a little snobby about it:

Sadly, Will isn’t shown eating breakfast, as per O’Farrell, or drowning his sorrows in a bar with Christopher Marlowe as he did in Shakespeare in Love, the upper-middlebrow crowd-pleaser to which Zhao’s exercise in Elizabethan fan fiction plays as a melodramatic companion piece. Shakespeare in Love was a featherweight romantic fantasy, and a skillful one; no less than Harold Bloom conceded its merits as a neatly brocaded time waster. “I mustn’t snipe,” he told Newsweek in 1999 after watching the film on VHS, “because this is a charming movie. It does capture ‘Romeo and Juliet.’ And that I think is the glory of it.”

Charm is not on the docket in Hamnet, although it does have similar aspirations to award-season glory. Coming off the blockbuster debacle of Marvel’s Eternals—a suboptimal follow-up to the gritty, independently produced best picture winner Nomadland—Zhao has returned with serious intentions. Hamnet is a swing for the fences and, as such, determinedly lugubrious from beginning to end: a litany of furrowed brows and primal screams, awash in blood and sweat and other precious bodily fluids.

Oh man, he is not kidding about the primal screams. Thankfully I did not see it in the theater and could turn my computer audio down whenever someone started screaming again.

Unlike Hamnet, I actually did tear up at the end of "Shakespeare in Love" because it packs an actual dramatic punch, in spite of its humor and charm. And it was at least as popular as Hamnet, demonstrating that you can please people and still make a good movie about Shakespeare.

 Patrick Sprouli in the Independent:

Having sat through it twice, it’s clear to me that Hamnet is not a film made up of intelligent choices. From the epigraph – explaining that Hamnet and Hamlet are functionally the same name – to the finale scored to Max Richter’s Volvo advert-friendly “On the Nature of Daylight,” Hamnet is a blunt spade designed to whack you over the head until you weep from the pain. It has been marketed as a film that burrows down to a primal, base feeling – an effective way of writing off its crude creative decisions. It dramatises Shakespeare and his wife’s response to their son’s sudden death from the plague, and it has one mission statement that it knows you cannot find fault with: the death of a child is a universal tragedy. If you take issue with Hamnet creatively then you are, of course, a cold-blooded cynic who doesn’t possess enough love in their heart.

Even better, the review explains why the movie is so far from anything to do with the works of William Shakespeare:

Hamnet’s wink-wink allusions to Shakespeare’s work appear to make sense when you realise that Zhao actually started her career penning fan fiction. It would be easy, then, to consider Hamnet a work of fan fiction, but Zhao is – by her own admission – not a fan of Shakespeare. She has spoken about how, as a Chinese-born filmmaker, she wasn’t raised with Shakespeare as a cultural standard-bearer and that she relied on O’Farrell and Mescal to navigate the text. But the plot of Hamlet cannot, like tracing paper, be cleanly laid over the life of William Shakespeare. Hamlet himself is the vengeful, arrogant Prince of Denmark, not a frightened little boy. There is a specific reason why O’Farrell maintained minimal reference to the play in her novel and focused almost entirely on Agnes’s internal maelstrom of emotions. Hamnet doesn’t actually make sense if you know even the tiniest thing about Hamlet.

Thank you for that.

And here's Fiona Mountford in The I Paper:

Thus, Hamnet, about Shakespeare’s family life, the death of his eponymous young son and the staging of his – as well as the world’s – most famous play should have been a dream come true for a cinephile theatre critic like me. So keen were my friend Deb (a long-time admirer of Maggie O’Farrell’s source novel) and I to see the film that we went on the very first afternoon of its release last week. Reader, I hated it, and so did Deb, finding it unforgivably overwrought and portentous...

Exactly. Portentous! 

The Globe was a famously rumbustious place, and yet in this film, a reverential silence cloaks the audience from the very first line (and let’s not forget that Hamlet’s unedited running time is more than four hours). They are, Zhao is at great pains to tell us, utterly bewitched by the magnificence of Shakespeare’s words; I confidently predict that theatre sceptics who watch this will have all their worst assumptions confirmed for ever more.

Agnes alone, of course, understands the real life rooting and connections behind the play, so I’d have been more than happy for Buckley to be visibly transfixed and to hold out her hand to the young actor playing Hamlet during his Act Five death scene. But the whole audience doing this? Come on. After four hours, a good percentage of them would have been less rapturous and more desperate for a pee. Idolising – embalming, even – theatre like this does no one any good.

Hamnet fails tragically, comically, pastorially and historically. 

I feel about Hamnet fans the same as I feel about fans of "Love Actually" - they are so insensitive and unperceptive that they need to be bashed in the face with ham-fisted hysterics to feel anything.

Murderbot is almost here!

The next book in the Murderbot series is almost here!

And it sounds good - I was especially happy to see that a bad guy character with some humanizing tendencies is back:

Murderbot encounters another unexpected obstacle: Supervisor Leonide, a higher-up in the Corporation Rim, who convinces the reluctant robot to help her family, sending it on a long and dangerous quest to rescue five more humans. 

I cannot wait.

Summer is here

Well Sprinter never had a chance, the weather leapt from Arctic levels of cold two weeks ago to 77 degrees today. Completely bonkers.

I took advantage of the weather to finally explore my new neighborhood, although it isn't completely new since I used to work nearby. 

I visited some of my old haunts today including the glacial erratic. Back in the day, in 2014 to be exact, this ancient rock, resting immovable in the middle of a side street got no respect. There were parking lots for nearby businesses all around and people even used the rock itself for parking - I took a picture myself back then, which you can see here.

These days the entire block is a park dedicated to the rock, with tables and benches and several lively cafes nearby. Although I will say, the little park is fairly neglected, I saw a lot of garbage strewn here and there including some on the rock itself. Somebody needs to start a volunteer club to take care of the park. It deserves at least some of the care given to Central Park, which has teams of volunteers working to keep clean seven days a week.

Not far away from the rock - I don't think anybody has given it a name - is a cafe called The Local, where I used to go and hang out during the work day, so I stopped in to check it out. It's still pretty much as I remember it.

I wonder if the French are still crazy about Long Island City - that was apparently a thing back in 2017. My own theory was that they liked it because the movie Julia and Julie - the Julia was "the French Chef" Julia Child - is set there. I did hear a couple of guys speaking French in a different cafe the other day, so I wouldn't be surprised. 

The Julie in the movie had a blog, back in the early days of blogging. Now it's a thing of the past. Except for some of us.

Oh no I just missed Mamdani!

I'm a big fan of the restaurant Chez Ma Tante in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, so I was there on Sunday. 

Only to find out that I missed Mamdani, who was also there that night!

We went for an early dinner so probably left before he got there. Oh well, I'm glad that even though he lives in Gracie Mansion now, on the Upper East Side, he hasn't forgotten us here in the "commie corridor."

RIP Bud Cort

Bud Cort is dead. He made it to 77. His much older co-star in Harold and Maude, Ruth Gordon, made it to 88.

I've mentioned Harold and Maude on this blog a few times over the years. I first saw it in my teens and it had an impact on me. I was glad the NYTimes chose the image of Cort, as Harold Chasen, the morning after spending the night with Maude, as he is blowing bubbles. The implication is that Harold lost his virginity and the shot makes that obvious.

I realize the film's director Hal Ashby deserves a lot of the credit for the shots and the vividness and pacing of the film, and Ruth Gordon was the prefect casting choice, but the New York Times notes that Cort added his own personal touch to the film:

Mr. Cort was 21 when he played the part of Harold with wry confidence; many of his most memorable moments, like a fourth-wall-breaking smile into the camera, were his idea.

This is what they're talking about. 

I can't be the only one who thinks that young Bud Cort looks like Cole Escola.

Cort didn't have the most spectacular career, but thanks to Harold and Maude, he is immortal.

Take on me hot take

Back in the day I was among those who turned up our noses at electronic-heavy pop music which we often called, idiotically, "art-fag music."

But now I can't stop listening to Norwegian synth-pop band a-ha's big 1984 hit "Take on Me." 

I came across it in one of those Apple Music collections, probably "music of the 80s" and for the first time really noticed the singer's vocal range. 

As it says in the Wiki page for "Take on Me"

Harket demonstrates a vocal range of over two and a half octaves.[14] He sings the lowest pitch in the song, A2 (the tonic), at the beginning of the chorus, on the first syllable of the phrase "Take On Me".[14] As the chorus progresses, Harket's voice hits ever higher notes, reaching a falsetto[12][16][17] and hitting the song's highest note, E5, (the dominant) at the end.[14] Rolling Stone has thus noted the song as "having one of the hardest-to-sing choruses in pop history".

It really is something. 

And then I discovered that the band Walk Off the Earth did a cover. 

I've blogged about that band, way back in 2012 because I was very impressed by their video of "Somebody That I Used to Know" which is also a cover. It's the first video on this blog post.

Anyway the vocals on Walk Off the Earth's cover of "Take On Me" are not quite as swooping and exciting, but they are impressive, and the almost nil electronica would have made even dumb 23-year-old me happy.

The orchid is fine

I had to hire a separate mover to move my plants, since I was afraid if I used a regular mover for my plants, they could end up sitting in an ice cold truck for hours.

So I had to get a Task Rabbit guy with a heated van to move the plants. And my orchid and all the other plants survived very well.

But orchid is definitely outgrowing its pot - time to repot this spring.

Good-bye Roosevelt Island

I found shelter on Roosevelt Island, within the first year of Covid, after I left the Upper West Side. It's a quiet place, part retirement community and part college campus - a lot of people living in my building were associated with Cornell University which has an actual college campus on the south end of the Island. 

And I really loved my apartment, with its spectacular view. And I enjoyed living in the middle of the East River, and could walk around the entire island in two hours, more or less.

I could only afford to live in that apartment because rents were in the basement thanks to Covid - but once Covid was over, landlords all over New York started making up for lost rent, plus extra. My rent went up by $1300 in the five years I lived there, and finally, in spite of annual raises, I was priced right out.

I'm sure this rent-hike mania on the part of the haves is what made so many have-nots vote for Mamdani. That was certainly one reason I voted for him, although just the fact that he wasn't: a former governor and sexual assaulter who was chummy with Trump; a corrupt  mayor who was chummy with Trump; or a crazy cat man were enough reasons to vote for him.

So now I'm over here living in the Commie Corridor. My apartment view is not spectacular, although at least I can see the Empire State Building from my street.

Welcome back flower

The orchid is in bloom again.

When last I talked about the orchid, I thought it might bloom all the way into autumn, but that didn't happen. It took a break from mid-September until early January.

And now it's back, baby.

A love story in 43 songs: was John queer for Paul?

Last spring, I got Ian Leslie's "John and Paul a Love Story in Songs" and read it right away. 

There was quite a bit to talk about after that first pass, but I've listened to the audiobook version several times since then, as well as watching or listening to a bunch of podcasts with Leslie, and I have more thoughts about the book now.

First, it's a love story in 43 songs, which I put together as an Apple Music playlist, and made available here. It's 2 hours and 24 minutes long.

Although Leslie doesn't only talk about the 43 songs named as chapter titles. I especially liked his discussion of I Know (I Know) from Lennon's "Mind Games." See below for more.

It's a very good book, since Leslie takes a new approach to Beatleography with the focus on the John/Paul partnership. His thesis is that John and Paul had a romantic, but not sexual, relationship, although Leslie does speculate, with some evidence, that Lennon was a bit on the bi-side. It's a very interesting idea, although I felt he stretched it a little, occasionally.

Leslie takes this idea the furthest in the chapter "Look at Me" and it gets pretty sexy:

John said that no one ever hurt him the way Paul hurt him. McCartney was nonplussed at John's anger towards him in the late 60s and early 70s, which seemed to go beyond the normal frustrations of co-working or the annoyances of friends. Even Yoko was baffled by John's animus towards Paul. She speculated to Phillip Norman (Beatles and Lennon biographer) that John might have contemplated an affair with Paul and that Paul rejected him. "I knew there was something going on here," she said. "From his point of view, not from Paul's. And he was so angry at Paul, I couldn't help wondering what it was really about." 

Yoko kept an audio diary in 1968, on the 4th of June, a month after her romantic relationship with John began, she said to her tape recorder: "I'm sure that if Paul had been a woman or something, he would have been a great threat, because there's something definitely very strong between John and Paul." 

There is little doubt that John was predominantly heterosexual, but as we've seen, he was also curious about same sex desire. 

"I think he had a desire to have sex with men, but I think he was too inhibited," Yoko said in 2015, before modifying herself. "No, not inhibited, he said, 'I don't mind if there's an incredibly attractive guy. It's very difficult, they would have to be not just physically attractive, but mentally very advanced too, and you can't find people like that.'" 

It is at least possible that in early 1968, John felt he had found someone like that. Perhaps John was queer in a modern sense, fluid in his preferences, and more so than Paul. He seemed to dream of an all consuming relationship that wrapped music and sex and love into one. Whether or not this is so, what matters is that John felt rejected and abandoned by Paul after Rishikesh. The wounding probably took place inside his head, but that of course doesn't make the pain any less real. In fact, knowing that it was inside his head may have made it worse. 

Everyone who watches "Get Back" is struck by the intensity with which Lennon and McCartney hold each other's gaze as they play through endless versions of Two of Us. The two friends spent an unusual amount of their lives looking into each other's eyes... 

...John had known Paul planned to leave Rishikesh before him, but even so, he didn't like people leaving. As 1968 went on, he began the painful process of accepting that the one person he regarded as an equal, the one he saw as his best friend and creative soul mate, didn't see him in quite the same way. When John wasn't being looked at by Paul, he didn't know who he was supposed to be.

McCartney has always been adamant that if Lennon had any gay tendencies he would have known about it, but Leslie seems to think that McCartney often failed to pick up on emotional signals from Lennon. Certainly Yoko's testimony is pretty compelling. And the lyrics of "Look at Me" which is on Lennon's "Plastic Ono Band" are pretty suggestive when considered in light of Leslie's discussion, and knowing that Lennon wrote "Look at Me" in India, before he got involved with Yoko in a big way:

Look at me
Oh please look at me, my love
Here I am
Oh my love
Who am I?
Nobody knows but me
Nobody knows but me
Who am I?
Nobody else can see
Just you and me
Who are we?
Oh my love

He argues that several of the John songs mentioned in the book are about Paul. I have my doubts about some of his claims, but I think he really nails it with Lennon's "I Know (I Know.)" I must have heard this song for the first time, long ago, because I had the vinyl version of the Mind Games album once upon a time, but I wasn't impressed by most of Mind Games except for Bring on the Lucie (Freda People).

But Leslie makes the case that I Know (I Know) is about Paul, and listening to the song now, he is surely right. Here are the lyrics:

The years have passed so quickly

One thing I've understood

I am only learning

To tell the trees from wood

I know what's coming down

And I know where it's coming from

And I know and I'm sorry, yes I am

But I never could speak my mind

And I know just how you feel

And I know now what I have done

And I know, and I'm guilty, yes I am

But I never could read your mind

I know what I was missing

But now my eyes can see

I put myself in your place

As you did for me

Today, I love you more than yesterday

Right now, I love you more right now

I know what's coming down

I can feel where it's coming from

And I know it's getting better all the time

As we share in each other's mind

Today, I love you more than yesterday

Right now, I love you more right now

Ooh, no more crying

Ooh, no more crying

Ooh, no more crying

Ooh, no more crying

• The song starts out sounding just like "I've Got a Feeling" which was one of the last songs that Lennon and McCartney worked on equally. Lennon has quoted the titles of Beatles songs several times, most flagrantly in "Glass Onion" and in the infamous "How Do You Sleep," released two years before Mind Games, which was an attack on Paul. It's certain that Lennon knew exactly what the opening to "I Know (I Know)" sounds like.

• Lennon mentions "yesterday" which was one of the McCartney song titles he also used in "How Do You Sleep." You can see McCartney performing Yesterday on stage in the video on my December 3, 2025 post. Lennon was absolutely obsessed with writing a song better than Yesterday, which, although attributed to Lennon/McCartney was written entirely by Paul.

• He also mentions "it's getting better all the time," in case anybody missed the Yesterday reference.

• The line about put myself in your place as you did for me - in his book, Leslie points out how often McCartney had to defend Lennon from the results of his own poor choices.

• I think the "no more crying" line is significant. Leslie shares Mal Evan's testimonial of how McCartney responded when Lennon announced he was leaving the Beatles: 

...the 20th of September, Klein convened John Paul and Ringo (George was visiting his mother) at Apple to sign the deals he had negotiated with EMI and capital. The date of this meeting is a little uncertain. It could have been the 16th of September, McCartney's diary entry for that day reads in block capitals THE END. The deals guaranteed the band an increased royalty rate while committing them to make two albums and three singles a year until 1976. 

It's unclear how realistic each of The Beatles themselves regarded this commitment as being. After the signing, the three Beatles discussed the future of the group. Paul floated his idea of playing small venues and John, well, Paul has described the moment vividly enough: "John looked at me in the eye and said, well I think you're daft. I wasn't going to tell you till we signed the capital deal, but I'm leaving the group." 

A year later, Lennon recalled it like this: "Paul just kept mithering on about what we were going to do. So in the end I just said "I think you're daft, I want to divorce."  

...in 1975, Mal Evans recalled the meeting and its immediate aftermath."That was really, truly a heartbreaking experience. I drove Paul home and we got to Paul's house and he spent the next hour in the house crying his eyes out."

It seems very likely that Evans had told this recollection to Lennon by the time Lennon was making "Mindgames" during his time in Los Angeles, since Evans was in LA with him.

In addition to the focus on the Lennon-McCartney relationship, "A love story..." has quite a few excellent essays on lots of their songs. I will be discussing those later.

But now, to wrap up all this McLennon shipping, I found this video extremely amusing -  the host of this podcast, Carly, is very entertaining, and it's pretty wild to hear the Beatles described by someone from Generation Alpha - or whatever generation she's from, I really can't be bothered to keep track of those generation categories.

Carly gets a few things wrong: she claims they fired Pete Best because he was handsome and that's why they got Ringo - because he was not. In fact, their producer George Martin thought Best was a shit drummer, when they began their recording career, and that's why they got Ringo, who was not only a better drummer, but they felt a more personal rapport with him. 

Carly says they played in Berlin - it was Hamburg. 

She says the John/Paul trip to Paris was in June for Paul's 21st birthday - it was in October, for John's 21st birthday. 

She guesses that the Chunnel existed in the 1960s.

Her description of the "rude mechanicals" scene from "A Midsummer's Night's Dream" which the Beatles performed was: "...a play on Pyramus and Thisbe...  I believe it's like a Greek tragedy that Romeo and Juliet are based off of..." 

She claims that Patty Boyd told George that the Maharishi was hitting on women, but it was actually Alexis Mardas (aka "Magic Alex") who told George and John.

She mentions Lennon's play, FOUR IN HAND, which is about masturbation and is included in the at-the-time scandalous "Oh! Calcutta!" which I actually didn't really know much about. Thanks to the Internet I was quickly able to find the play. It's not bad at all, although the Wikipedia article claims that the "first draft" was written by Lennon, so who knows how much is was changed by others in however many drafts it took to finish.

I like that Carly defends McCartney's 1970s band Wings, and also that she rightfully excoriates "Simply Having a Wonderful Christmas Time" which is one of the worst examples of what a music critic once called McCartney's "rooty-toot persona." 

Although now I cannot think of that song without laughing, thanks to comedian Ryan George.

Hoboken Squat Cobbler should be a 10-minute play

I was idly thinking about this scene from "Better Call Saul" in the episode "Cobbler" and wishing it was a ten minute play. 

 

BCS is a highly-regarded show, but this is just one 5-minute scene in a multi-years-long series, and likely to be long-forgotten. Although Bob Odenkirk and the actors playing the cops are absolute geniuses and made of steel to be able to get through it without breaking down laughing.

The website Something Awful created a fake magazine devoted to the Squat Cobbler concept.  

If it was in a 10-minute play it could be saved in an anthology of the best ten minute plays, and treasured and performed frequently. 

The end of the scene is cut off in this clip when Jimmy tells his client he's going to have to make a video.

And the BCS people actually did make a video and you can see it here.

I'm just saying though - the perfect 10-minute play. 

Taxi-drivin' Philip Glass

I knew who Philip Glass was, I had sat through Koyaanisqatsi. I have only so much tolerance for repetition, but I have been impressed at times by Glass, like by his commentary on Erik Satie in this documentary.

Recently I discovered this piece from an album Glass made with the band Uakti called Aguas da Amazonia. The piece is "Japura River." Of course it's repetitive - come on, it's Philip Glass - but it is 

a. relatively short

b. has lots of cool instruments

c. great percussion

It's quite popular so there are several versions of the song available on YouTube, including an all guitar version and an all-glass and wine bottles version - I guess a word play on the name Philip Glass?

But I got around to reading Glass' biography finally and I love the fact that he was a plumber, moving guy and taxi driver while he was also a working composer:

In order to pay rent, composers frequently take up secondary jobs. Borodin was a licensed chemist, Ives worked in the insurance industry, and the pioneer of minimalist music Philip Glass supported himself by working as a plumber, furniture mover and taxi driver. “I was careful,” the composer explained, “to take a job that couldn’t have any possible meaning for me.” Even after Glass achieved fame and notoriety with his opera Einstein on the Beach in 1976, he still continued to ply his blue-collar trades. Called upon to install a dishwasher, “I suddenly heard a noise and looked up to find Robert Hughes, the art critic of Time magazine, staring at me in disbelief. ‘But you’re Philip Glass! What are you doing here?’ It was obvious that I was installing his dishwasher and I told him I would soon be finished. ‘But you are an artist,’ he protested. I explained that I was an artist but that I was sometimes a plumber as well and that he should go away and let me finish.”

and

Glass first performed his music in the concert hall in 1974, and slowly his career blossomed. Yet he kept driving his cab even after the breakout premiere of Einstein at the Beach. Gradually, more and more commissions trickled in, and slowly Glass realized that the taxi driver’s license he had renewed as a precaution might not be needed. Glass understood that he had finally arrived as a composer when a woman tapped on the side of his cab and told him “you have the same name as a very famous composer.”

When will we have a movie about the young Philip Glass, called Taxi Driver Taxi Driver Taxi Driver? 

Great Beatles clip! Blackpool Night Out 1965

Such a great, clear, live video of the Beatles in their Beatlemaia prime. It's been online for five years and only has 93K views. JFC, there are My Little Pony episodes on Youtube that have been up for two months that have more than twice as many views. I mean, I like MLP but this is the Beatles! 

The audience screams frequently but they don't drown out the music.

And the camera work is surprisingly well done, alternating between wide and close-up shots.

Highlights:

• John plays the keyboard with his elbow.
• Ringo introduces himself (singing "Act Naturally") in the third person. Paul duets with him for most of the song.
• Great duet with John and Paul on "Ticket to Ride"
• George introduces Paul's "Yesterday" solo: "And so for Paul McCartney of Liverpool, opportunity knocks."
• There's an actual orchestra playing during the song, just like on the record.
• John's introduction to "Help" - "our latest record... or our latest electronic noise, depending on whose side you're on."
• The Beatles dancing with the Lionel Blair Dancers.

I've been on another Beatles tear recently, having discovered the hundreds of Beatles related podcasts. There are dozens that feature Ian Leslie of "John and Paul: A love story in songs" fame, a book which of course I read, and I've also listened to the audio book a couple of times. One of the interesting points Leslie makes is how jealous John was of the song "Yesterday." 

60 years ago. Amazing.

HEAVENS TO MERGATROYD! This blog is twenty years old!

Yes the name of this blog was inspired by
one of Snagglepuss's favorite exclamations.

My first blog post was not very inspiring: 

I'm still working out the kinks, come back later, it will be better. Thanks.

Back in those days we thought that George W. Bush was, and ever would be, the worst president of the United States. 

All these years I've been hogging the domain name mcclernan.com for myself, in spite of having many relatives, close and distant, who share the name. But so far nobody has complained.

I recapped the first ten years, back in 2015. Obama was president then, so things were looking up from the Bush years. 

So what's happened since November 2015?

I was blogging pretty heavily from 2015 through 2018, averaging about 300 blog posts per year, more or less. But blogging fell way off in 2019, when I only managed 59 posts and after that only managed 42, 28, 23, 29 and 34 posts each year after that. This year I have 43 posts, counting this one, so far. 

The reason blogging dropped off so much on Heavens to Mergatroyd is at least partly because I started my blog Pinkerite and instead of writing about politics and especially race pseudoscience on this blog, I started writing about those things over on Pinkerite instead.

I see that in 2015 I expressed my admiration for the feminist writer Sady Doyle who since then became Jude Doyle. I mentioned him in January of this year in a blog post on Pinkerite. 

2016 started out on a high note when I moved from Astoria back to Manhattan, to the Upper West Side in a quaint hundred-year-old walkup. Then I moved out thanks to unpleasant neighbors in 2021. 

Trump was elected. I immediately became interested in Canada and in the French language. I had been in Canada once, in 2005, before I started this blog. Since Trump was elected I visited Canada in 2017, 2018,  twice, then not again until January of this year. 

Part of the reason for the gap, I think, was because Biden defeated Trump in 2020, and I didn't feel as much of an urge to get out of the United States during that time. But when Trump was elected again in 2024, I went to Montreal during the inauguration, just to be out of a country full of morons who voted for a rapist fascist disgusting felon psychopath, clearly in the early-mid stages of dementia. 

And of course there was Covid.

In the past ten years I traveled to France and Slovenia.

I've written about learning French quite a few times. Thanks to my French studies I ended up learning more about Peppa Pig and My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic than someone my age would ever expect to know. Dear god I know so much about My Little Pony now.

I  also created my own animations in French, but they are pig and pony-free.

I discovered Murderbot, Justin Trudeau and Emmanuel Macron. I knew J. D. Vance was a creep in 2016.

I've continued to express my appreciation for the Beatles and in particular for Paul McCartney in the past ten years. 

I've memorialized Earl Rich, a friend of mine who was killed in a motorcycle accident in 1997, several times on this blog.

Quite a few people I have known have died in the past ten years. My childhood arch-enemy John Sayers, my young adulthood arch-enemy Laura Garth, my actor friend Tony White, another actor friend Doug Rossi, my college friend Geri Tuckett. And of course my cats, poor Miss Willow and poor Mr. Fuzz. But at least my cats lived about as long as cats normally live, the other people I mentioned here died before their time. Since my cats died, I've switched to caring for plants instead.

Theater-wise, things have been slow. I only managed to eke out one production, Norma Jeanne at the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic about Marilyn Monroe in the past ten years, but I've written three solid full-length plays since 2020 and am working on a fourth.

Pete Duel, Judy Carne, Ben Murphy
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Here's a funny coincidence - I've written about Pete Duel on this blog - first in 2005, then again in 2015.

And the Pete Duel Memorial Site is still going strong in 2025. The entire series "Alias Smith and Jones" is now available on the Internet Archive.

One of my favorite episodes, "The Root of it All," was quite feminist for 1971. In the episode, Smith and Jones meet a feisty woman played by Judy Carne and another woman played by Victoria Thompson. 

Well Thompson showed up in a playwrights group I was part of for a couple of years in 2022-23. I knew I had seen her name before and after Googling around I discovered she had been in AS&J - but I never got a chance to ask her about the experience. But still, it was a funny coincidence.

In addition to this blog, I've had my blog NYCPlaywrights going since 2010, and Pinkerite since 2018.

TOP TEN POSTS IN THE PAST 10 YEARS

1. Did Brigitte Macron and her first husband appear in an episode of "French in Action" - mystere et boule de gomme! - over 16,000 visits.

2. Move over Dr. and Mrs. Vandertramp! - 15.6K visits.

3. Steven Pinker's right-wing, alt-right & hereditarian connections (before I moved my politics to Pinkerite and also updated the diagram.) - 4.2K visits.

4. No, Erik Satie did not only eat white foods(!!!) - 2.98K visits.

5. What do the evo-psycho bros think "race" is? (before I moved my politics to Pinkerite). - 2.74K visits.

6. Qui était Jeanne de Bret? - 2.68K visits.

7. #Free Melania - yes I know Melania has only herself to blame for marrying Trump, but my god, you can see what a grotesque psychopath he is in this video. No wonder, according to Trump's biographer Michael Wolff, she hates him. -  2. 22K. visits.

8. RIP MTM - I discussed the death of Mary Tyler Moore. 2.15K visits.

9. Watching Justin Trudeau talk about feminism is the most erotic experience of my life - still undefeated - 1.94 K visits.

10. Manhattan statuary - surprisingly popular at 1.94K visits.

Will I manage to blog for another ten years? Time will tell.

You can read about the history of blogging here.

James Burke can play the guitar!

While searching YouTube to find the segment (maybe in Connections) where Jame Burke talks about plate tectonics and Wegner (long story) I found this video. Amazing!

GODOT IS HERE

Or: no more waiting for GODOT, I saw the show today. 

It was quite good. They did a lot with the funky inside-a-barrel set design and Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter were both great.  And the second act was even funny, I laughed out loud. 

Good job everybody.

The House of Blue Rape Culture

oh, those wacky hijinks

I'm a big fan of Tony Kushner, as can been seen over the past almost 20 years of this blog. Although to be completely honest, I'm more a big fan of Angels in America and his screenplay for the movie Lincoln. I'm much less impressed by other Kushner work, but still, he's my favorite living playwright and I almost always enjoy his interviews like this one with the goddess Rachel Maddow.

 

Clearly there's something wrong with me and my taste in theater, because I hate almost every play I see, and over the course of this blog I've trashed the works of Mac Wellman, David Mamet, Edward Albee, Adam Rapp, Tom Stoppard, Chekov, Strindberg and especially Landford Wilson.

It hasn't been all negative, I've said some positive things about the work of Annie Baker, and I loved FUN HOME (the musical based on the comix of Allison Bechdel) and I love Peter Shaffer's Amadeus. 

I am a fan of WAITING FOR GODOT in spite of Beckett having been a misogynnist - his everymen protagonists must never be women, since after all, this is a play about the human condition. I have tickets for tomorrow's performance of the production with Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves.

But I'd say that at best I enjoy only one out of every thirty plays or musicals that I see or read. I like a handful of contemporary plays, plus OUR TOWN and a half-dozen of Shakespeare's best plays: HAMLET, ROMEO & JULIET, KING LEAR, A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM, AS YOU LIKE IT and HENRY V. And that's pretty much it. It's depressing.

And here we go again. 

I follow Tony Kushner's husband on Bluesky - I almost always like his posts because I agree with his political views - so I reflexively clicked the likey for his post about the Kushner-edited collection of the plays of John Guare: "He's one of our most important, funny, and original playwrights."

And then I made the mistake of reading THE HOUSE OF BLUE LEAVES. You can read it for free on Archive.org.

The play is over fifty years old but here is a SPOILER ALERT anyway.

I like Britannica's summary of the play: "In 1971 Guare earned critical acclaim for The House of Blue Leaves (filmed for television, 1987), a farce about a zookeeper who murders his insane wife after he fails as a songwriter." 

In the Archive.org version of the play the blurbs include one from the leftist magazine The Nation: "full of waggish merriment..."; the Village Voice: "Guare knows there is nothing funnier than the clash between American dreams and the American way of death..."; USA Today: "a woozy, fragile, hilarious little heart-breaker..." 

Although I guess you could defend the humor on the basis of it's funny 'cause it's true - men do murder their wives, insane or not, all the time. And when THE HOUSE OF BLUE LEAVES premiered in 1971, domestic violence wasn't considered an important issue.

Of the six women in the play, four are dead by the end: the crazy wife, two nuns and a deaf "aging film starlet." All defective or unavailable for sex, and so not much value for the men. The starlet's boyfriend mourns her for ten minutes before convincing the hero's mistress to fly away with him. The surviving nun rejects celibacy, and so avoids being offed by Guare. The hero's mistress, while an obvious bitch because she refuses to cook on demand, is at least worth raping.

Of course I knew that rape was considered a hoot back in those days, since Bill Cosby was killing it in 1969, with his hi-larious bit about drugging and raping women. But still, I was amazed to read the hero's monologue:

It's kind of funny, a chimpanzee knocked me in the back and kinked my back out of whack and I went to this health club to work it out and in the steam section with all the steam I got lost and I went into this steam room and there was Bunny—yeah, just towels-I mean you could make a movie out of this, it was so romantic— She couldn't see me and she started talking about the weight she had to take off and the food she had to give up and she started talking about duckling with orange sauce and oysters baked with spinach and shrimps baked in the juice of melted sturgeon eyes which caviar comes from—well, you know me and food and I got so excited and the steam's getting thicker and thicker and I ripped off my towel and kind of raped her... and she was quiet for a long time and then she finally said one of the greatest lines of all time.... She said, "There's a man in here."

There's no "kind of" rape - she doesn't even see him until he's raping her. You see, that's why it's so hysterically funny - she realizes "there's a man in here" because she was just raped by one. 

The Clive Barnes New York Times review of the premier of THE HOUSE OF BLUE LEAVES in 1971 does not mention the rape. Artie is everyman and we are meant to sympathize with him, because straight white men had it the worst in the middle of the twentieth century:

Artie's troubles are manifold: His mistress won't cook for him, his songs are rejected, his wife is as nutty as a Thurber cartoon, his best friend is as crazy as a Feiffer cartoon, and he is invaded by nuns, two of whom are blown up by his son, who clearly has an unfortunate genetic disposition. 

 

Yet Artie keeps on smiling. He believes that one day he will wake up over the rainbow in Los Angeles and find himself as famous as Bob Hope. He keeps on smilingly right until just before the end. 

 

Mr. Guare has a telling way with the karate chop. His black inversions have a Joe Orton air to them, but his tone is all‐American emanating from a mind riotously littered with the detritus of a civilization, its comic books, its radio serials, its movies, indeed all of its advertisements—to steal and adapt Norman Mailer's phrase for itself.

In his review of the 1986 production, Frank Rich says:

By evening's end, Bananas has actually become one of her husband's animals. Bananas likes animals, she has explained, because they're not famous and because they represent to her the buried feelings that her fit-regulating pills usually restrain. Miss Kurtz's metamorphosis brings the theater to a shocked hush. Her slender hands become paws dancing in the air, her voice trails off into a maimed puppy's whimper. As Bananas nuzzles helplessly against her husband, Mr. Guare's inspired image of the all-American loser acquires a metaphorical force as timeless as West's locusts. Where once there was a woman with stars in her eyes, we see a battered mutt, the forgotten underdog that the bright lights of our national fairy tales always pass by...

Then the all-American everyman puts the mad dog down, like Old Yeller. But the play is no longer quite as funny as it was fifteen years before:

Yet a funny thing has happened to ''Blue Leaves'' ...The play no longer seems all that funny, and it's none the worse for the shift in tone. While some of Mr. Guare's jokes are indeed dated remnants of the 60's, his characters and themes have gained the weight and gravity so lacking in his more pretentious recent plays. Time hasn't healed the wounds described in ''Blue Leaves'' - it's deepened them. One still leaves the theater howling at Mr. Guare's vision of losers at sea in a materialistic culture, but the howls are less of laughter than of pain.

He doesn't mention the rape. 

In a recording of that 1986 production by the American Playhouse, now on YouTube  the line "kind of raped her" gets a solid laugh as the character played by Christine Baranski covers her face with her hands. It's extra creepy that it's Frasier's dad confessing to raping Christine Baranski.

A September 2008 review of an Orange County California production entitled ‘House of Blue Leaves’ will leave you blue Paul Hodgins writes:

Almost four decades after it turned its author, John Guare, into a name playwright, “The House of Blue Leaves” seems like both an ossified artifact of the ’60s and creepily relevant to our own troubled times.

I certainly get the "ossified artifact" part, but I'm not sure about the relevance to our own troubled times. Later he says:

In the end, it’s too much – but that, of course, is Guare’s point. The promises, priorities and threats of the modern world have unhinged us, and nobody’s acting sensibly anymore. It’s a warning that’s more urgent now than it was when the play was written.

Why is it "more urgent now?" From what I remember of September 2008, the big issues were the financial crisis and Barack Obama was recently nominated to be the Democratic candidate for president. Neither of those things would seem to have any connection to the issues of this play - but maybe for Hodgins, Obama's nomination was a sign that the whole world had gone insane. 

Looking back, it was a blessed time in comparison to the state of our country now.

Hodgins refers to the protagonist of the play as an "everyman" in spite of the protagonist being a rapist, but then again, why not? If Guare wrote a zany farce based on the rape of Gisele Pelicot by a parade of everymen, would it be much different?

Sheila O'Mally, writing about the 2011 production in Politico also fails to mention the rape and is annoyed that the audience does not react the way she feels they should, because in her opinion, if you don't anticipate this humorous farce ending in murder, you are insane:

I felt the audience resisting Ben Stiller (as the hero) in the part. They laughed at everything he said, whether it was funny or not, seeming to need him to be the clown at their birthday party that they expected. Their laughs were insistent, rather than reactive, almost trying to push him where they wanted him to go. In the final harrowing moment, when it becomes clear what Artie is doing, a couple of people around me gasped. This is a good response, obviously, and appropriate, but based on all that had come before, I felt the audience turn on the play in that moment. They had been expecting a Ben Stiller laugh-riot, and instead they were given this? The play is so hilarious that the ending, which any sane person could see coming from a mile away, hurts. Good. It should hurt. But I felt the resentment in that well-dressed crowd. I felt them withhold their approval.

The 2011 review in Vulture by Scott Brown is the only one I have found so far that mentions the rape monologue, but only in passing:

Hovering in the wings is Artie’s ten-clawed climber of a mistress, the fierce Bunny Lingus (Leigh). (Guare, whatever your overall opinion of him, is one of the great moniker-makers of the postmodern stage.) The pair met when Artie “kind of raped her” in a health-club steam room, and since then, she’s been convinced of his indomitable drive, even as his lingering attachment to his invalid wife has her wondering...

To be fair this was still the early days of the #MeToo movement, before Harvey Weinstein made Hollywood and the theater world realize that maybe it's not a good idea to be casual about rape. Damn I am so mad I missed the reading of A PLAY ABOUT DAVID MAMET WRITING ABOUT HARVEY WEINSTEIN back in June. I hope it comes around again soon.

Brown has an epiphany at the end:

This is a furious play, a vicious and ungenerous play, and we should be made to feel that. I got it in gentle waves, but never in hurricane-force slaps. Perhaps it’s just the passage of time: House was written back when the grand promises of the Great Society and Vatican II were decaying even faster than the Star System of Old Hollywood, and no purposeful revolution could cohere or find secure footing. “When famous people go to sleep at night, it’s us they dream of, Artie,” chants Bunny, without rue or irony, in a kind of lullaby. “The famous ones, they’re the real people. We’re the creatures of their dreams.” A line like that ought to galvanize us, the passive patsies out in the gallery. Instead, I felt a gentle perplexity. Sometimes, sitting out there in the dark, watching these famous people mount a case for the violent, oppressive absurdity of fame, I felt like a creature of their dreams. And I wondered, Inception-like: Who needs to wake up? Me or them? 

 

The flip side of all the famous people who have performed the play are all those community theater actors who have performed the play. It's certain that at least some of them dreamed of greater fame than treading the boards at the Playcrafters Barn Theater. 

Assuming that, like most who've experience the play, apparently, they don't think the protagonist being a rapist makes him any less of an all-American everyman - do they feel targeted by the play as it mocks this old old man - 45! - because he still has dreams of something beyond his day job? 

In the 2024 review of the Playcrafters Barn Theater production Madeline Dudziak writes:

Maybe Guare’s writing just isn’t particularly funny to me. Perhaps the script, like Banana’s moniker, hasn’t aged well, or the other patrons on Saturday were as confused as I was … but it just wasn’t humorous. Sure, a few good one-liners elicited laughs, but in truth, the show was completely depressing. Honestly, when Landuyt (playing "Billy Einhorn") finally arrives and sobs uncontrollably for a few minutes, it makes perfect sense, because it is all simply sad. Even the asides were woeful. Nearly every character had a moment to chat with the audience to let us in on what was going through their heads – a moment of connection, if you will. These flashes of personal insight into the characters could have shifted the dark tone to one slightly funnier, but they simply reiterated how broken all of these people were.

I don’t know what genre I’d lump The House of Blue Leaves into. This production may defy genre altogether, but it’s far from a miss; the entire talented cast performs beautifully, salvaging the sorrowful script, and the set is lovely. The unsettled ending certainly doesn’t clear anything up. But maybe you’re the kind of theatre-goer who doesn’t need closure to your questions.

It's astounding that even in 2024 the rape goes unremarked, as if it is a very minor detail of the story, just an odd little quirk in the protagonist's meet-cute story.

I will be on the lookout for reviews of any future productions of "The House of Blue Leaves." I wonder if they'll leave the rape line in, and if they do, what the critics will say about it - if anything.

And your bird can sing-a-ding-ding

John & Paul sit in with Jacky and the Strangers 
in Obertauern, Austria, March 18, 1965

Speaking as we just were of interpretations of the songs of John Lennon, I was  thinking of the fan theory about the Beatles' greatest non-hit "And Your Bird Can Sing." 

The theory has been around for a while but it was new to me: the song is about Frank Sinatra.

This YouTube video made by the channel James Hargreaves Guitar explains the theory in detail. 

I already loved the song, but thinking it is not just great music but a dig at Frank Sinatra makes it even better. 

Another aspect of this song that I only learned of recently is the guitar-doubling by Paul and George.

Other notable versions of the song, available on Youtube, are take 5, and this fan version that isolates the instruments.

And of course the version, also available on the Anthology, featuring Lennon and McCartney laughing and goofing around. This is the greatest version. The only thing like it in the Beatles oeuvre is the outro of "Hey Bulldog" and of course the immortal "You Know My Name, Look Up the Number."

#9 Dream - happy birthday John Lennon

       Ah! Bowakawa, pousse pousse

John Lennon would have been 85 today.

I was recently listening to #9 Dream from his album "Walls and Bridges" which was my first introduction to Lennon's solo work, when it was released in 1974. He recorded "Whatever Gets You Through the Night" with Elton John, and it was a big hit, Elton John being the it boy of the time.

From what I've read online, Lennon said he was depressed during that time. And as we know, this was during his separation from Yoko. He claims he got the song entirely from a dream he had.

It has always struck me, from the first time I heard it, as an expression of his longing to go back to Yoko.

So long ago. Was it just a dream?

From the perspective of his "lost weekend" in Los Angeles, his early days with Yoko, while he was still part of the Beatles phenomenon must have seemed so long ago. Back when they were doing performance art and creating Revolution #9 - the infamously weird "musique concrète" cut from the White Album.

Yoko's voice is heard on that recording.

As for the chant:

Music touching my soul

Something warm, sudden cold

The spirit dance was unfolding

Ah! Bowakawa, pousse pousse

Ah! Bowakawa, pousse pousse

I think Lennon's subconscious turned a longing to return to the Dakota, where he and Yoko had lived together, into a quasi-Native American chant and "spirit dance." The Dakota has a Native American relief sculpture showing the date the apartment was completed. The Dakota got its name because when it was built it was considered so far away from the center of Manhattan life that it was said to be like "out in Indian territory." I'm sure that Lennon, like everybody else who has ever lived in the building, had heard that story.

Posted on Facebook today: